No Future 2025

Some half baked, hopefully just depressive, thoughts I shall perhaps return to later:

I've always tried my best never to fall for the illusion of the liberal rules-based order but now that facade has been ripped off and discarded, I can't help but dread the world to come. It has always been power, the flows of commerce, desire and violence moving according to power, but it has always relied upon the myth that it was right, that there was something worth preserving. What does it mean now that the myth has no place, that "might makes right" is the open slogan of the decade?

It's not just Trump or Musk and the technocrats who increasingly monopolise and mediate every aspect of our lives. We saw it with the global response to the genocide in Gaza, in what seems to be an experiment for the powerful in what they can get away with, where even the mealy-mouthed criticism of Israel (seen in 2014 and 2021) failed to materialise as they were given carte blanche to commit genocide on a captive population. If this decline in any illusion of justice in this world order started recently, it started under Biden. The liberal response to Trump's victory and plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (see the "are you happy now" style mocking of the uncommitted vote) display what I fear will be a worrying historical amnesia over the annihilation of the strip. It is not a matter of persons. Biden was a decaying figurehead for a decaying global order, whose necrotising flesh will endure undead, but this cannot be put down to political figures alone.

It feels like the last four decades have been a long game to slowly erode the post-War global formation, starting with the gutting of the welfare state, that concession to the spectre of Communism that no longer is. Now it's in some final stage, the removal of the fundaments of the Liberal order: the right to protest, secularism, even the concept of universal rights. I hope I don't sound paranoid but I get shaken by the thought that maybe this is some plan for power and capital to stay vested where it is against any instability caused by climate change; that maybe some people know just how bad things will get, and that this is all some plan to build the means of a violent repression to safeguard the hell they can come out on top of. Perhaps I'm paranoid or perhaps thinking of it as some individual plan is the clearest way of making sense of how modern capitalistic power is often dispersed.

I feel as I go about my life that people are becoming more atomised, ignorant and incurious, casual cruelty is everywhere. I often struggle with a hopelessness at times, I lose faith that there could be a world where people can be free to live peacefully with each other. What if it could never be, what if those times when the old parties and counter-cultures had a chance were to always end up here? The U.K. politically has given up on the possibility of things improving, there is only resignation to hold on to the little you have against a wave of imagined threats: immigrants, transgender people, the woke mob, etc. Give up on any dreams of enjoying life, of creating and living freely; no, it is just work and consumption of the entertainment that you will be fed by some vicious algorithm (the protestant work ethic disrupted for the 21st Century!). Beware of other people, they want to take what you have. There is no future, only a weakened present that will only get weaker while more and more scapegoats are created to allow outpourings of state-sanctioned cruelty and the ocean boils while we do nothing. 

I have been known to be an anxious type, but there is fear in the air.